Five methods of consulting:
traditional yarrow stalks, coin odds, one moving line, two hexagrams, and playing cards.

Besides consulting the I Ching, you may look up the results of previous consultations
by entering either line numbers, such as 888697; or hexagram and moving line references,
such as 20:4,5 or 20-35.
The advanced results include the Chu Hsi and Nanjing rules of oracle selection, basic line relationships,
nuclear trigrams, steps of change, transitional hexagrams, fan yao, patterns of change, anti-hexagram, King Wen counterpart, correctness hexagram, balance hexagram, shadow site, reversed trigrams, core trigrams, alternating
trigrams, and ascending hexagrams.
The inverted and reversed “foursome” of hexagrams with their corresponding lines, mutating hexagrams, evolutionary hexagrams, and all possible single-line hexagram transitions may be displayed as well.

I have no intention of trying to explain the I Ching. Is it the oldest book in the
world? The first binary number system? A 4096-sided die whose faces all display vague
Rorschach-like sayings that stimulate the imagination and provide a medium for expressing the
unconscious? An oracle that connects us to a less-understood reality? You decide.

Most automated I Ching programs and scripts operate via computer-generated random
numbers. This is not unlike the flip of a coin, which is how many people consult the I Ching.
But the yarrow stalk method, in addition to an element of randomness, involves a volitional act on the part
of the user, in the division of the stalks into two groups. The Virtual Yarrow Stalks I Ching
seeks to duplicate this by having the user click on a group of virtual yarrow stalks of varying widths.
Done without conscious effort, this is much closer to using real yarrow stalks than is instructing the computer
to generate numbers.

The document, VirtualYarrowStalks.zip,
is text-only and easy to save. It is intended to be simple and portable, able to be used anywhere.
It operates via dynamic HTML (like the hexagram images above).

Newest pages:

Consulting the Shen Shu, a minor divination system with unclear origins that has fairly recently made its way from China to the west.

Dynamic Playing Cards. A dynamic energies method using playing cards. This is my preferred method at the moment.

by John Minford. The product of a vast amount of scholarship concerning the I Ching and classical Chinese literature in general. A major focus of the work is the contrast between the ancient bronze age oracle, which ironically we have learned about mostly during the last hundred years; and the book of wisdom which grew by accretion over two millenia, and which many people today are the most familiar with. An example of the difference is the word heng or xiang, which is usually rendered as “success” or “fortune” in familiar-sounding translations. In the bronze age it meant “sacrifice,” probably literal, and possibly human.

However the Hexagrams and their related texts themselves may have evolved, at this early stage in its history the words of the Oracle were linked to no system of ideas, to no Confucian or Taoist philosophy or Yin-Yang cosmology. In other words, the early oracular Change of Zhou was not yet a Book of Wisdom. It provided its readers (the kings and aristocrats who consulted it) with glimpses (often puzzling ones) of the workings of the Universe and man’s part in it, glimpses descended from the ancient shamanistic dialogue with the unknown.

The work is thus presented as two separate translations: the book of wisdom, and the bronze age oracle. Each is accompanied by generous references to previous works, commentaries, other ancient sources such as the Book of Songs, and the latest archaeologic and linguistic discoveries.

The following three books will also revolutionize your understanding of the I Ching with long-lost information that has been unearthed since Wilhelm made his great translation.

by Kerson and Rosemary Huang. This is the book that turned me on to the Zhou Yi, the original I Ching oracle text before it lost most of its historical references and became encrusted with centuries of Confucian commentary.
The translation can be a little “idiosyncratic,” but the introduction is one of the best there is, including
fascinating research into the Yi’s Shang Dynasty roots.

As early as the Song Dynasty (twelfth century A.D.), scholars noticed that there were undecipherable “strange characters” on Shang and Zhou bronzes. Similar “strange” inscriptions have been found on oracle bones unearthed in modern times and on earthenware recovered from ancient tombs. There had been various interpretations of these markings, including the suggestion that they were characters from a tribe foreign to either Shang or Zhou.

Everything fell into place when, in 1978, Zhang Zhenlang proposed at a conference in Changchun, China, that these characters are in fact numerals representing divination lines, like the 6, 7, 8, 9 of the yarrow oracle.

by Richard Rutt. An incomparable wealth of information about the latest research
into the earliest form of the Zhou Yi.
Once you’ve picked it up, it’s hard to put down. Were the hexagrams originally
pentagrams? How was the oracle actually selected in the 5th century BC? Contains all ten wings.

’. . . the Book of Changes is to be explained in the light of its own content and of the era to which it belongs . . .’
When Richard Wilhelm wrote these words in 1923, he believed they described what he had done in his great
German translation. Yet within ten years archaeology and philology had shed new light on ancient China, revealing
that what Wilhelm had produced was a Book of Changes smothered by philosophical theories that were unknown in the
era to which it belongs. Three-quarters of a century later, Chinese sinologists have shown that the book is really a
Bronze Age diviner’s manual dealing with war and human sacrifice, giving advice to rulers at the dawn of literature.

by S. J. Marshall. What was the real origin of what we now know as the I Ching? After three millenia, its original text has been obscured by linguistic change and generations of commentary. But according to Marshall:

Traces remain, however, of these original oracles; dating clues, hidden names, and ancient places are still in the book, some having eluded discovery for the past 3,000 years.

The most important clue is found in hexagram 55, “the polestars can be seen at noon.” When does this happen? During a total solar eclipse, one of which occurred on June 20, 1070 B.C., and may have marked the fall of the Shang dynasty and the transfer of the mandate of heaven to the Zhou. This book is a landmark in itself. It also examines topics such as forgotten proper names in the text, the mingyi bird of hexagram 36, melons, willows, hoarfrost, and creepers.

by Richard John Lynn. The major ancient non-Confucian treatment of the I Ching.
The more I use this book, the more I like it. This and Wilhelm are like bookends; they each treat the I Ching as a wisdom book, but complement each other. Contains the Great Treatise, Wang Bi’s third-century commentary, and notes by several of his successors. Printed in a narrow, almost “pocket” format for some reason; someday soon I will need a large print version.